The phone rang in the other room. I wasn't going to answer it – anyone calling for me would have used my cell phone or the phone in my room – but then I thought it perhaps might have been the girl whose apartment we were subletting it from calling to discuss move-out details.
"Hello?"
"Hello, my name is [something German] and I'm calling from [somewhere German]. May I please speak with Mark [also something German]?" the man said, entirely in German.
It should be noted that at this point a touch of panic came over me. Part of it is due to not wanting to accidentally screw up someone's life by accidentally incorrectly giving wrong information. And part of it is due to a long-held sense of paranoia, that if I accidentally said too much on the phone to strangers I might somehow be letting some ax-murdering psychopath know that I was a woman home alone, and by the way the doors were unlocked. So needless to say I was a little nervous, and this nervousness negatively affected my German skills.
However, it had immediately struck me that this was likely a wrong number, since I didn't at all recognize the name. I fumbled around for a way to express this. "He is not here." I managed to get out, in German.
"When will he be there?" the man annoyingly persisted, since he obviously failed to divine from my imprecise utterance and exuded psychic energy what I was trying to tell him.
I tried to make the point plainer. "No, he's NEVER here," I inarticulately but insistently blurted out, also in perfect German.
Now this guy must have really wanted to talk to this Mark fellow to still be putting up with this conversation. He rephrased his question.
"Bitte?" I hadn't understood it.
"Why is he never there?"
At this fortuitous moment the verb "wohnen," meaning "reside," suddenly emerged from the fog in my head. "He do not live here," I explained, conjugating incorrectly.
"Mark [lastname] doesn't live there?"
"The name again?" Perhaps it was a little late in the conversation to be checking that I'd gotten the name correctly, but I did want to be sure I really didn't recognize it from anything.
"Mark [lastname]."
"No, he do not live here," I affirmed, still not conjugating correctly.
"I must have the wrong number."
"Ya think?" I answered, although in German it came out as an unsarcastic "ja."
Mercifully for everyone the call ended shortly thereafter.